KAH residencies: My soul knows my meat is doing bad things
A collaborative curatorial project between Paulina Drėgvaitė and Nick Wood
Friday 4 May, 6pm
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style
– Quentin Crisp
In the first of a series of illustrated and performative lectures Paulina Drėgvaitė and Nick Wood dissect the notions of failure in societal discourse through the lens of YouTube as an archive of the everyday, hosting micro-histories of the pleasures of failure. The evening will look at online archives as an abyss, a dark and seemingly endless void of time and history with an algorithmic-keeper alongside user-curators. It will also look into failure as a rupture of expectations and society’s view of the failure to be happy as exceedingly intolerable against a tide of projects of self-fulfilment, productivity and potential.
Through collating footage, found text and writing we will traverse the digital landscape together, slipping, tripping, stumbling, bumbling, and ultimately failing to reach the end.
“I feel bad for laughing.”
In May 2018 Kaunas Artists’ House will continue its artistic residency series by hosting artists and curators Paulina Drėgvaitė (UK/LT) and Nick Wood (UK). During their residency the artists will establish an open studio within KAH in which they will be developing My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, a new artistic collaboration exploring the notions of failure, boredom and waste. Combining differing backgrounds from both film curation and contemporary art this new project hopes to explore interests within counter cultures, defining anti-productivity and alternative modes of archiving. Viewing YouTube as an archive of everyday micro-histories, this project aims to locate alternatives to the notions of success and productivity that dominate societal discourse.
By exploring the underbelly of YouTube we discover the people sharing their individual knowledge and experiences to an audience that is indefinable yet omnipresent to them. These videos explore everything from shopping trips to family birthdays, hair dying to local ferries; and they seemingly sit perfectly alongside music videos, archive footage and live streams from the UN. By positioning these videos on a horizontal plateau YouTube allows us to effortlessly jump between a multiplicity of moments, experiences and ideas. This enables us to extract new meaning from the familiar and safely experience the unfamiliar, offering an intersection between the public and the private. This platform is an enchanting archive of secret wishes, confessions and failures both public and private.
‘My soul knows my meat is doing bad things’ invites you to a YouTube party like no other. Abandon watching those tutorials and never-ending cat videos in private – curate, explore and join Paulina and Nick.
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All events are free of charge.
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